Research Projects

ℹ️ For a complete list of Dr. Newport's publications, please visit the Learning and Developmental Plasticity webpage. For a complete list of Dr. Getz's publications, please visit her website.

Overviews

Research at the Learning and Development Lab focuses on language acquisition. We are primarily interested in the mechanisms underlying children’s remarkable abilities to learn languages and also the differences between children and adults in language learning. Our work includes studies of children acquiring English or American Sign Language as their native language; studies comparing children and adults learning miniature languages in the lab; and brain imaging of children and adults during language learning and language processing. For overviews of the lab's work, see these papers:

Newport, E. L. (2016). Statistical language learning: computational, maturational, and linguistic constraints. Language and Cognition, 8(3), 447–461.

Newport, E. L. (2020). Children and Adults as Language Learners: Rules, Variation, and Maturational Change. Topics in Cognitive Science, 12, 153–169.

Two Lines of Research

(1) Cognitive and neural mechanisms of language learning

Our lab's research has shown that children and adults can acquire many aspects of language structure from patterns in rapidly presented auditory sequences (which we have called statistical learning). These patterns include the frequency with whic sounds and words appear in miniature artificial language materials, and the neighboring elements with which they co-occur. We have also shown that statistical learning occurs for musical sequences and visual-spatial patterns, indicating similarities in early learning across domains and modalities. Our most recent work in this area aims to understand (i) how statistical learning might underlie the acquisition of grammatical patterns, including morphology, phrase structure, and sentence structure; (ii) how the linguistic representations acquired through statistical learning might evolve spontaneously over time through processes of memory consolidation; and (iii) the brain systems that underlie this type of learning.

Selected publications in this research area:

Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928.

Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (2004). Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies. Cognitive psychology, 48(2), 127-162.

Thompson, S. P., & Newport, E. L. (2007). Statistical learning of syntax: The role of transitional probability. Language Learning and Development, 3(1), 1-42.

Reeder, P. A., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). From shared contexts to syntactic categories: the role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes. Cognitive Psychology, 66(1), 30–54.

Getz, H. R., & Newport, E. L. (2019). Privileged computations for closed-class items in language acquisition. In A.K. Goel, C.M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Ed.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1822–1899).

Getz, H., Ding, N., Newport, E. L, & Poeppel, D. Cortical tracking of constituent structure in language acquisition. Cognition, 181, 135–140. 2019.

(2) Comparing child and adult language learners

Children are the most important human language learners. Our research on statistical learning (see above) has suggested that children and even infants are capable of carrying out the same sophisticated computational analyses as adults. However, in other studies, with differently structured languages, we have found striking differences between the learning of children and adults. There are also well-established differences between children and adults for the learning of natural languages, including—as shown by our own research—for learning signed languages such as American Sign Language. Our most recent work in this area compares children and adults learning miniature languages in the lab, in order to better understand how learning changes across development.

Selected publications in this research area:

Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive science, 14(1), 11-28.

Singleton, J. L., & Newport, E. L. (2004). When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input. Cognitive psychology, 49(4), 370-407.

Hudson Kam, C. L., & Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language learning and development, 1(2), 151-195.

Culbertson, J., & Newport, E. L. (2015). Harmonic biases in child learners: in support of language universals. Cognition, 139, 71–82.

Schuler, K. D., Yang, C., & Newport, E. L. (2016). Testing the Tolerance Principle: Children form productive rules when it is more computationally efficient to do so. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 38).

Austin, A. C., Schuler, K. D., Furlong, S., & Newport, E. L. (2022). Learning a language from inconsistent input: Regularization in child and adult learners. Language Learning and Development, 18(3), 249-277.

Student Research

Graduate and undergraduate student researchers in our lab have made important contributions to our lab's research. Here are some of our recent graduates.

Doctoral students

Kotfila, J. A. (2023). The acquisition of word order: From strings to sentences.

Fetch, A. B. (2020). Does learnability predict syntactic universals? An investigation using artificial languages.

Getz, H. R. (2018). Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition.

Schuler, K. D. (2017). The acquisition of productive rules in child and adult language learners.

Undergraduate students

Engström, C. L. (2024). Investigating stages of morphosyntax acquisition using artificial language learning.

Kaye, A. B. (2024). Consolidation of language in the developing brain.

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